The KickoffLabs Blog

You should be distilling your elevator pitch down to a tweet as soon as you think about your idea. If your elevator pitch is timed for the 60th story then you’ve already lost. In today’s attention starved world you need your value propositions distilled down to short bites that build on one another, can be taken out of context, and are built to be passed around, liked, and retweeted.

I love this discovery I found on the Harvard Business Review blog.

Don’t let your day job get in the way of your dreams. At KickoffLabs we’re building something awesome that we wished we had when we had day jobs… A simple service to sign up potential customers and help you work with them while you are building a product.

When someone registers for your product on KickoffLabs.com, they’ll get a thank you mail for doing so. But what makes that mail good and how could you customize that message to make it better?

A great article from Mashable by Guy Kawasaki highlights one of the key reasons we’re focused on helping you connect with customers via email earlier in your product cycle…

Another trend that we at KickoffLabs hope to capitalize on is the rise of the economy from the ashes. In one of our last posts I talked about how the new economy is forcing people to start small. But starting small doesn’t mean not starting.

It’s yet to be proven to me that pay per click advertising has any value to a new business as a way of attracting customers. Earlier this week we started running some targeted ads on the LinkedIn ad platform for KickoffLabs. I’m just glad they gave us free credits because I can’t yet trace a sign-up through that channel. So what value can these ad services have for your new business?

Agile development started with early adopters. The basic premise is that you start small and bite off small chunks of work and validate them before moving to the next chunk.  But this methodology is not limited to software development. It may have started there, but it won’t end there.

One of the most fascinating multi-year trends I’ve had the opportunity to witness is the systematic ability for people to cut out the middle-man between people with ideas and products and others that want to consume what they are producing. It may have started publicly with the music and publishing industry it’s moving into additional verticals outside of the entertainment industry.

We’ve gotten that question a fair bit in the last week since we opened our window a crack and started letting people sign up to be early adopters. We’ve even been asked if we are building a consulting service. The answer is no… we’re building a kick-ass product.